Getting Started on TM-Town

TM-Town User Guide

Registering

choose a usernameYour username should be between 3 and 30 characters and may only contain letters, digits or an underscore. No spaces are allowed.

enter your email

choose a strong password

Your Profile basic information

Upon registering you will be prompted to fill in some basic information about yourself to start building your TM-Town public profile.

You will be asked to enter your top language pair and field(s) of expertise. You can choose up to 3 fields of expertise.

Additionally, you can begin to build out your TM-Town profile by filling in your:

Name e.g. Manuel López

Preferred Name e.g. Manny

Country

Gender (used to set the default avatar)

Account Picture

You can edit your profile information at any time by visiting your Account Settings.

Why will TM-Town only let me choose 3 language pairs and 5 fields of expertise? I have way more than that!

TM-Town's mission is to create a better translation world through technology and specialization. Therefore, the restrictive nature of only allowing Professional tier members to choose up to 3 language pairs and 5 fields of expertise is on purpose to encourage you to specialize.

Regardless of your chosen language pairs and fields of expertise, there is actually no restriction on the number of language pairs or fields of expertise you can ultimately load work in. TM-Town is also built on the principle of 'showing' what you can do, not just saying it.

Can I change my chosen language pairs and/or fields of expertise?

For members on our Basic (Free) tier, there is no option to change the top language pair and fields of expertise that you select when you register for TM-Town. This is to discourage translators from continually changing fields or language pairs to 'game' the system. If you mistakenly selected an incorrect language pair or field of expertise please contact TM-Town support and the issue will be corrected.

For paying members you can edit your chosen language pairs and fields of expertise on your Account Settings page.

Your Profile additional information

To show yourself in the best light on TM-Town it is highly recommended to take the time to fill out as much additional information about yourself as possible. In your Account Settings you can fill in fields such as:

Native language

Tagline *Limit 45 characters

About me *Limit 300 characters

Don't Bother Me Rate

Years of experience

Software you use

Education

Associations and memberships

Social media and other profiles

Payment methods accepted and preferred currency

Apart from filling in the above information, the most important action you can take to improve your profile is to load work into TM-Town's system. On TM-Town, translators don't just say what they can do, they show it by loading in examples of translation work they have done. Any work you load in stays private and confidential.

The only data that is made public from an upload is:

Number of translation units

Any fields of expertise you tag the document with

Any language pairs in that document

The above data, along with the information you enter in your Account Settings, is used to help generate your TM-Town public profile as shown in the profile image below.

Loading Work

On TM-Town, all of the interesting things you can do revolve around the work you load into the system.

There are 4 main types of resources you can load into TM-Town:

Translation Memory (TM) files

Terminology files (aka glossaries or termbases)

Source documents (the original document that was translated)

Target documents (the translation)

TM-Town's uploader makes it simple to load your work. Just drag the file(s) into the dotted orange rectangle. Additionally you can click the + ADD FILES button to select files from your computer's file system. To learn more about TM-Town's uploader please see this blog post.

For the best OCR (optical character recognition) results it is recommended that your document:

has a DPI of at least 300 dpi

is not skewed or crooked

has clear text (lack of noise, shadows from scans, etc.)

does not have dark borders around the text

OCR is supported in the following 47 languages:

Albanian

Arabic

Azerbaijani

Bulgarian

Catalan

Cherokee

Chinese

Croatian

Czech

Danish

Dutch

English

Esperanto

Estonian

Finnish

French

French, Old (842-Ca.1400)

Galician

German

Greek

Hebrew

Hindi

Hungarian

Indonesian

Italian

Japanese

Korean

Latvian

Lithuanian

Norwegian

Old English

Polish

Portuguese

Romanian

Russian

Serbian

Slovak

Slovenian

Spanish

Swedish

Tagalog

Tamil

Telugu

Thai

Turkish

Ukrainian

Vietnamese

After loading a file it will appear in the table below the upload box.

Aligning Documents

TM-Town has an alignment tool that can help you convert a source and target document into a translation memory (TM) file. For an introduction to the concept of alignment see TM-Town's blog post Alignment the TM-Town Way.

For additional details on how TM-Town's alignment tool works please refer to this blog post or watch the video below.

Building and Maintaining Glossaries

Terminology glossaries are an important tool in a translator's tool belt to help maintain consistency in a project and also to help improve efficiency. On TM-Town it is easy to build new terminology glossaries from terms automatically extracted from translation memory files.

TM-Town also has editing tools to help you maintain and improve the quality of the glossaries in your TM-Town account.

Selling Glossaries

The TM-Town Terminology Marketplace is a central location where translators can buy and sell high quality terminology glossaries. The terminology files in this marketplace cover a wide variety of language pairs.

It is easy to get started selling glossaries on the marketplace. First upload the glossary into your TM-Town account and then click the Sell Glossary button to submit your glossary for approval.

Remember that while you can sell terminology glossaries, you can not sell translation memory (TM) files. The difference being that a TM file typically consists of segments that are generally a sentence in length. Glossaries, on the other hand, consist of terms that are generally 1 or 2 words in length.

For a full list of seller guidelines and frequently asked questions please refer to this page.

To learn more about selling your terminology glossaries please refer to this blog post or watch the video below.

Redacting Confidential Information

TM-Town's Confidential Information Redactor is a tool to help translators semi-automatically redact confidential information from a document. This feature allows translators to benefit from TM-Town's unique matching platform without having to save any confidential client data in TM-Town's system.

TM-Town takes privacy and security very seriously. Every document a translator loads into TM-Town's system is automatically private and secure. Even with these protections, some translators have mentioned they would be even more comfortable if confidential information could be redacted from a document.

Documents that are under 1MB in size are eligible for TM-Town's confidential information redaction tool.

Sharing Documents

On TM-Town it is easy to share documents with other TM-Town members. This may be useful if you are collaborating with other translators in a team setting.

Shared documents can be searched, edited or updated by the translators the document is shared with. The shared document can not be deleted and other 'Document Management' options are disabled.

This feature can also be used with TM-Town's CafeTran Espresso integration to allow multiple translators to collaborate on and update a shared translation memory file in real-time.

CafeTran Espresso Integration

CafeTran Espresso is the first CAT tool that TM-Town has integrated with. While working in CafeTran Espresso you can access, search and update your TM-Town documents.

It is also possible to upload files directly to TM-Town from CafeTran when you finish a translation.

Sending Your ProZ.com Portfolio Samples to TM-Town

It is possible to connect your TM-Town account to your ProZ.com account so that you can easily send your ProZ.com portfolio samples to TM-Town. This is a great way to get started on TM-Town. Once your samples are sent to TM-Town, they will be automatically aligned for you. Watch the video below to learn more.

Getting Started on TM-Town by Translating a Sample Source Text

If loading prior work into TM-Town's system is not an option because all of your prior work is under NDA or similar restrictions, one option to get started on TM-Town is to translate a short sample text in your field of expertise. TM-Town provides sample source texts in various fields of expertise. Click here to browse the samples.

If you can't find a sample in your source language or field of expertise please email us and we'll try to add a sample in your source language and field of expertise as soon as possible.

Deshi - Offline TM Analysis

Some translators may not have work which can be uploaded to TM-Town the traditional way in order to gain credit in a specific language pair and field of expertise.

That's why we created Deshi, a free offline desktop application that analyzes your TMs in the safety of your own computer.

By default, any document that you load into TM-Town is treated as follows:

It can be browsed online, and downloaded as a file, ONLY BY YOU. Other TM-Town users can not see or download it.

Documents you upload can NOT be searched or leveraged by others.

The only information made available to others concerning a document you upload is (1) the language pair, (2) the number of translation units, (3) the (up to three) tags you enter to categorize the content.

Documents you upload are NOT used to train machine translation ('MT').

Features such as alignment, term extraction and semi-automated glossary generation are provided solely for your benefit. Extracted terms and glossaries generated are NOT shared with others (unless you choose to do so).